The invention relates to a detection method using a receiver of a digital communication system for the detection of a symbol from a received signal, which signal is transmitted by a transmitter of the digital communication system, wherein the symbol is a selected symbol out of a predetermined set of symbols and wherein each symbol of the predetermined set comprises a sequence of chips wherein each of the chips is PSK-modulated according to a selected modulation code.
Detection methods of this kind are known and find their applications in a variety of digital data communication systems. These data communication systems can for instance be wireless data communication systems. According to known methods, the receiver of the data communication system detects a symbol by detecting successively the chips of the symbol This is referred to as chip-by-chip detection. After the detection of each chip, a correction signal for the Inter Chip Interference (ICI-effect) between neighbouring chips is generated and subtracted from the received signal
A first disadvantage of known methods is that detecting on a chip-by-chip basis gives rise to some loss of coding gain with respect to detecting an entire symbol at one go (this is detecting on symbol-by-symbol basis). A second disadvantage of known methods is that no use is made of the a priori knowledge of the predetermined set.